domingo, 18 de noviembre de 2012

In some ways the supreme modern political thinker and without doubt
the greatest ever to write in English, Thomas Hobbes did not spend all
his time pondering questions of authority and sovereignty. For much of
the last two decades of his life, this timid and yet combative man, who
died in 1679 at the age of 91, devoted himself to trying to do something
never achieved before or since – squaring the circle.

Part of a controversy with a long-standing foe, the mathematician
and clergyman John Wallis, it was an ambition that suited Hobbes’s turn
of mind. Fearful and cautious in his everyday dealings, Hobbes was also
an intrepid rationalist with an unwavering confidence in the power of
reason – especially his own – to resolve immemorial human dilemmas.
Writing about his dispute with Wallis, Hobbes declared, “Either I alone
am mad, or I alone am not mad. No third option can be maintained, unless
(as perchance may seem to some) we are all mad.”

What Hobbes admired about mathematics was the certainty it seemed to
offer. Mathematical theorems were demonstrable and irrefutable, and so –
he believed –were the principles of politics. In a passage cited by
Noel Malcolm in the introduction to his definitive new edition of Leviathan,
Hobbes argued that in governing human beings, experience was less
important than understanding these basic principles: “The skill of
making, and maintaining Common-wealths, consisteth in certain Rules, as
doth Arithmetic and Geometry; not (as in Tennis-play) on Practise only;
which rules, neither poor men have the leisure, nor men that have had
the leisure, have hitherto had the curiosity, or the method to find
out.”

For Machiavelli, writing over a century earlier, politics was best
understood through the study of history. In contrast, for Hobbes,
government was a deductive science, moving from unshakeable axioms to
inexorable conclusions. Anyone who grasped the elements of this science
could apply it in concrete political situations but no one was as well
equipped as Hobbes himself. As Malcolm puts it, “The point of his
abstract political theory was to generate counsel on how sovereign power
might best be maintained – counsel which the author of that theory was
best qualified to give.”

Hobbes is celebrated for his dark view of human nature but what is
most striking about him is his belief that the problems of politics can –
at least in principle – be easily solved. Lacking trust in one another,
human beings find themselves in a “state of nature” – a condition of
ruthless rivalry in which neither industry nor any of the civilised arts
can flourish. But to Hobbes the way out from this predicament seemed
clear. All that was needed was that his book would be read and its
lessons implemented by an intelligent ruler: “I recover some hope,” he
wrote, “that one time or other, this writing of mine, may fall into the
hands of a sovereign, who will consider it himself . . . and by the
exercise of entire Sovereignty . . . convert this Truth of Speculation
into the Utility of Practice”.

Hobbes’s combination of pessimism about human nature with a sublime
confidence that the human condition can be greatly improved if only
power will listen to reason helps place him in a distinct phase of
modern thought – that of the early European Enlightenment. Contrary to a
popular stereotype, Enlightenment thinkers are by no means always
optimists about the future. Modern-day partisans of enlightenment may
like to think of history as a saga of continuing progress culminating in
their own unrivalled wisdom, but Hobbes was fully aware that the moral
and political gains of one generation are very often lost by the next.
What he never doubted was the existence of a rational method that could
deliver human beings from the worst kinds of conflict. By contracting to
create a sovereign with authority to do whatever is needed to ensure
peace, humankind could escape life in the state of nature – “solitary,
poor, nasty, brutish and short” – and enjoy the amenities of “commodious
living”.

Because he had no interest in liberty or democracy as ends in
themselves, Hobbes can be seen as the greatest exponent of enlightened
despotism. Contrary to silly chatter about “liberal Enlightenment
values”, the Enlightenment has always included a highly influential
current of authoritarian thinking – a current that includes later
thinkers such as Jeremy Bentham and Auguste Comte, along with political
leaders such as Lenin and Ataturk. Hobbes belongs in this current but it
is part of his greatness as a thinker that he can also be viewed as the
founder of liberalism. His best 20th-century interpreters – the Marxist
C B Macpherson, Leo Strauss (intellectual mentor of the American
neocons) and the sceptical conservative Michael Oakeshott, acknowledged
that Hobbes, more than any other thinker, was the progenitor of the most
fundamental tenet of modern liberalism – the belief that there is no
natural or divine right to rule. The idea of Hobbes as a liberal seems
puzzling only as long as you cling to the historically parochial notion
that liberal values are essentially to do with a human right to freedom.
For Hobbes, government existed only to protect its subjects, but for
that very reason rulers were not bound to respect any of the freedoms we
now think of as integral to liberalism. A Hobbesian sovereign could
legitimately curb freedoms of belief and expression as long as doing so
was necessary to keep the peace.

Liberals today may be shocked that Hobbes rejects any ideal of
universal freedom but it is when his thought undermines the consoling
faith of bien pensants that Hobbes is most illuminating. Right-thinking
liberals are aghast whenever large numbers of people support
authoritarian regimes, invariably trying to explain the fact away by
reference to electoral corruption. If the majority in post-communist
Russia seem unconcerned with Putin’s assaults on freedom, that can only
be because democracy is underdeveloped. The possibility that, with all
his murky authoritarianism, Putin may be more liberal than much of the
population is not considered. Taking for granted that human beings will
always need safety before they want freedom, Hobbes had no need of such
evasions.

For Hobbes, the state exists to promote peace, not virtue or human
salvation. This view of government leaves room for a great deal of
freedom, for it precludes rulers using their power to promote any vision
of truth or goodness at the expense of the security of the subject. For
the very same reason, it also blocks governments from acting as
evangelists for freedom. At a time when governments have led us into a
state of perpetual war for the sake of nebulous ideals of universal
emancipation, this insight of Hobbes’s could not be more relevant.

Where Hobbes went wrong was in thinking that peace could be achieved
by applying an infallible method of the kind he believed existed in
geometry. Here he was attempting the political equivalent of squaring
the circle. Unlike Machiavelli, who understood that state-building
depends as much on fortuna – the intractable contingencies of history –
as it does on the skills of the ruler, Hobbes was possessed by the
cardinal illusion of Enlightenment thinking. Believing that the dilemmas
of ethics and politics are in principle always soluble if only human
beings apply reason, he screened out from his view of things all those
human passions that did not fit into his theory. Religious enthusiasm,
suicidal heroism and the practice of violence for its own sake were all
forms of madness, which an intelligent ruler – guided by Hobbes’s
principles – could outwit and overcome. Imprisoned and tortured when
fortune turned against him and he fell out of favour with the Medici,
Machiavelli would have smiled at this fantasy of rationalism.

Not taking sides on controversial issues in the interpretation of
Hobbes’s thought, Malcolm’s edition of Leviathan aims to present the
masterpiece as faithfully as possible. The result – a product of many
years of labour – is an astonishing achievement of the highest
scholarship. We have never before had so accurate and so richly
annotated a version of the text, and it is unlikely that there will ever
be another that can match this edition. If there is a drawback, it is
the price – £195 for the three-volume set – which puts it beyond the
reach of most people and also of many libraries. In a regress that would
not have surprised Hobbes, we seem to be reverting to a situation in
which scholarship is accessible only to the rich, who have no interest
in it.

John Gray is the New Statesman’s lead book reviewer. His latest
book is “The Immortalization Commission: the Strange Quest to Cheat
Death” (Penguin, £9.99) “Leviathan” by Thomas Hobbes, edited in three
volumes by Noel Malcolm, is published by Oxford University Press (£195).

miércoles, 7 de noviembre de 2012

Into the Storm

God—or, at least, various of
His acts and intentions, as some perceive them—has been at the center of
more than a few storms this autumn, and He has not always heeded the
ritual calls of politicians to bless America. Nor has He been noticeably
attentive to what one suspects are their most fervent prayers,
regardless of whether their affiliation is Republican or
Democratic—although, to quote a prominent pol who held office during an
epoch of even greater polarization than ours, “the prayers of both could
not be answered.” Anyway, Mr. Lincoln added, “the Almighty has His own
purposes.”

That He does. In His own inscrutable, scrupulously
bipartisan fashion, the Lord has kept Himself, and us, busy all fall.
The political season’s first hurricane, Isaac, forced the Republicans to
forgo the opening day of their National Convention, in Tampa. A week
later, in Charlotte, Isaac’s meteorological hangover frustrated the
Democrats’ plans for a spectacular outdoor finale to their
Convention: no stadium like four years ago, no fireworks, no fake pagan
temple. (That last touch was just asking for trouble.) As the campaign
gathered speed, a variety of professionals offered conflicting
interpretations of what theology requires. Cardinals stressed the perils
of obliging health insurance to cover contraception; nuns emphasized
the Gospels’ concern for the poor and powerless. Pentecostal pastors
anathematized same-sex marriages as contrary to God’s law; mainstream
ministers pointedly performed them as consonant with God’s love. An
Indiana senatorial nominee said that when a rapist impregnates his
victim “it is something that God intended to happen.” In the first
television debate between Barack Obama and Mitt Romney, the President
performed so poorly that he blew his painstakingly constructed lead in
the polls—an error so otherwise unaccountable that divine (or, possibly,
satanic) intervention seemed as good an explanation as any. And then
came Hurricane Sandy.

The largest tropical storm system in the
recorded history of the Atlantic Basin was still an abstract swirl on
the weather maps of American television when the flood of speculation
about how it would affect the political fortunes of the Presidential
contenders began to crest. It would hurt Obama, because it would
interfere with early voting, which his organization was better
positioned to exploit. It would hurt Romney, because power outages would
limit the reach of the blitz of TV attack ads that pro-Republican Super
PACs had planned for the campaign’s
final week. It would hurt Obama, because its lingering aftereffects
would depress Election Day turnout, especially among the poor, the
frail, and the immobile. It would hurt Romney, because it would remind
voters of the last Republican Administration’s catastrophic mishandling
of Hurricane Katrina. It would hurt Obama, because low-information
voters blame the incumbent executive for bad weather. It would help
Obama, because it would enable him to “look Presidential.”

The
storm came and, for one night, wiped away all such chatter. It came to
the megacity at dusk, deceptively and unequally. If you were in an
apartment in upper Manhattan, there was the whistle of wind, the swaying
of trees, the patter of rain—nothing more, not even thunder and
lightning. But in the lowlands, near the seashores, the harbors, the
bays, the Sound, the river: apocalypse. The very ocean rose,
tsunami-like, relentless, terrifying, bringing devastation by flood and
wind and wind-whipped fire, and, for some ten million people in a swath a
thousand miles wide and encompassing sixteen states, darkness and
dread. By the weekend, the material damage was reckoned at fifty billion
dollars, the human damage at a hundred dead, thousands homeless, and
untold numbers of lives and livelihoods upended. The losses put Sandy
second to Katrina in its destructive power. But its implications for the
future, its intimations of what may be in store for us all, are far
more dire.

“The
nine most terrifying words in the English language are ‘I’m from the
government and I’m here to help.’ ” Ronald Reagan used that line many
times, and he could always rely on getting a hearty laugh. Well, this
week the government is very much here, and it is helping. The public
employees whom 9/11 taught us to call “first responders”—the
firefighters, cops, and sanitation workers—were here from the start. But
this time the state authorities were ready. And, yes, the national
government—“Washington,” that hated entity—was ready, too, and it has
responded, on a vast scale and just as quickly.
On Wednesday, a
pair of representatives of both levels of government, Governor Chris
Christie, of New Jersey, and President Obama, together inspected the
ruined coast of Christie’s state. Christie is a Republican, and not just
any Republican: he was the keynote speaker at the Convention and has
been one of Romney’s most valued campaign surrogates. A week before the
storm, Christie had derided Obama as “blindly walking around the White
House, looking for a clue.” But, if once the President was blind, the
Governor seemed to suggest, now he can see—and the Governor, in turn,
now saw the President differently. “Obama’s extraordinary leadership,”
Christie said, was “outstanding,” “excellent,” “wonderful.” When a Fox
News host asked him if he might make a similar tour with Romney, his
reply was curt. “I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or
interested,” he said. “If you think right now I give a damn about
Presidential politics, then you don’t know me.”
Another public
official, equally preoccupied with the storm, decided that he did give a
damn about Presidential politics. Michael Bloomberg—three-term mayor of
New York, ex-Democrat, ex-Republican, now a man without a party but not
without a pulpit—is the nation’s most prominent high-information swing
voter. On November 1st, he declared that he will be casting his vote for
Obama. The storm, he wrote, “has brought the stakes of Tuesday’s
Presidential election into sharp relief.” Even though, “like so many
other independents, I have found the past four years to be, in a word,
disappointing,” the stakes, in the Mayor’s view, are high, and the two
nominees and their parties “offer different visions of where they want
to lead America”—on education, on marriage equality, on the direction of
the Supreme Court, and, above all, on the warming of the earth and the
rising of the seas that, virtually all scientists agree, are the work
not of Providence but of people, and were factors in Sandy’s severity
and in the likelihood of many more such catastrophes to come. One party
“sees climate change as an urgent problem that threatens our planet,”
the Mayor wrote. “One does not.” On November 6th, we will learn which
will be entrusted with the power of the Presidency. Meanwhile, the
oddsmakers have their odds, the pollsters their percentages, the pundits
their hunches. What the voters will decree, in their wisdom or their
folly, God only knows. ♦